If you’re big enough, Cisco will cook you a private software SKU

Vulture South last week spotted an oddity in this Cisco end of sale announcement for “Cisco Select UCS Server Accessories”.

Way down the page are a couple of products bearing the name “Telstra” – that’s Telstra as in Australia’s dominant telco.

The two products are called “Telstra Custom – 10 x (MapR-Conf-Hadoop, DB-AddOn, Spark-Ad)” and “Telstra Custom – 5 x MapR-Premium-36months” and the announcement stated that sales ended last week, on November 15th, 2017, that orders end next year and the service and support will expire on February 28, 2023.

Rodney Hamill, Cisco’s director of data centre and cloud for Australia and New Zealand, explained what this is all about.

“A custom SKU has been created for Telstra, of which none are customized products but a compilation of solutions to simplify their ordering process,” he said. “Cisco rarely develops and enacts custom SKUs. However, Telstra is a global customer that is at the front edge of compute capabilities, which is characteristic of the Australian market that consists of many early adopters of new or innovative technology.”

“In this instance, we (Cisco) have tried to support the customer (Telstra) in an appropriate and effective manner.”

So there you have it: if you’re an AU$28billion company (US$21bn) with over 32,000 employees, Cisco goes out its way to make it easy to shop.

The rest of us have to make do with the company’s regular channels, which are of course extensive and omnipresent. And as of last week warned customers, in another end of life notice that as of November 15, 2018, Cisco will stop selling Windows Server 2012 for UCS servers.